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‘I don’t recognize my country’. ‘I want my country back’. These have for many years been the sentiments of those opposed to immigration into Britain. Immigrants, so the critics claim, have taken over ‘our’ country, turning cities into mini-Kingstons or little Lahores, creating, in the words of David Goodhart, former director of the centre-left think tank Demos, ‘an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds’. Or, as the Oxford University demographer David Coleman, a vocal opponent of mass migration, put […]

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘Why Britain Fails in Class’. Few people could have predicted the first policy on which Britain’s new prime minister would take a stand. It is none of the issues that have […]

Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. Many myths have grown around the confrontation, including about the role of the Communist Party, which has often claimed for itself the […]

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain: The fact that neither selective nor nonselective school systems have improved social mobility in Britain might suggest that the problem lies in the very idea of using schools to engineer a more equal society. A decent education system can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth, but it is unlikely to change fundamentally the social and economic […]

A system in which ‘confidence tricksters, rich men, quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s papers’. That could have been any number of contemporary commentators, from Richard Dawkins to Andrew Sullivan, expressing their fears about democracy after the Brexit vote in Britain or the rise of Donald Trump […]

I recently gave a long interview to Dutch journalist Marco Visscher about Brexit, migration, democracy, politics, being offensive, growing up in racist Britian, and not being in a Hollywood movie. It was published in the Belgian magazine Knack (and a shorter version in the Dutch paper Trouw). The interview has been translated from English to Dutch then (roughly) back to English, so may not read very coherently in places. I have edited it lightly. It was published in Knack under […]

I took part last week in a ‘Talking Migration’ podcast with Rob Ford, Professor in Political Science at the University of Manchester, about the Brexit vote and the role within it of migration, and of hostility to migration. ‘Talking Migration’ is a podcast series produced by Clara Sandelind of the University of Huddersfield. (I sound in the podcast as if I’m standing in the middle of a cave and shouting – my apologies, I was obviously sitting in a highly resonant […]

The Observer today ran a series of short comments on David Cameron’s legacy. Here is my take (the original, not the Observer‘s cut version, which made a short comment even shorter). Had David Cameron not won an election he never expected to win, he might not have lost a referendum he never expected to lose. Had the 2015 general election produced a continuation of the Coalition government, as many, including Tories, expected, it is unlikely that there ever would have been […]

The decision by British voters last week to leave the European Union has brutally exposed two features of contemporary British politics. The first is the depth of popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions. The second is the paralysis of the political class in the face of this disaffection. The Brexit victory was buttressed by a coalition of disparate social groups. Traditional Conservative supporters in the shires and the suburbs have long been suspicious of the European project. Few were surprised […]

It was, without question, a bloody nose for the political establishment, the biggest it has received for decades. And many have read the unexpected success of the Leave camp in the British EU referendum straightforwardly as a revolt against the political class and as a victory for democracy. Yes, it was a revolt against the political class in London and in Brussels. But the referendum result was also far more complicated than that. The anti-EU sentiment was not UK-wide. It […]

Whatever the result of the Brexit referendum on Thursday, of one thing we can be sure: Britain will neither be invaded by marauding Turks, as anti-EU campaigners suggest might happen if the country votes ‘Yes’, nor will Western civilization collapse, as EU president Donald Tusk fears after a ‘No’ vote. There will undoubtedly be economic and political turbulence, but Britain will not be staring into the abyss, however it votes. But, if the world will not end for Britain, neither will the […]

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the controversy about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘The British Left’s Jewish Problem’. I have slightly edited it to take account of the fact that the original was published before the London Mayoral election. It has, admitted […]

This essay on Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoral victory, Trevor Philips’new pamphlet on diversity and the public discourse on Islam was published in the Observer, under the headline ‘Muslims are not a ‘different’ class of Briton: we’re as messy as the rest’. ‘It shows it is possible to be Muslim and a Westerner. Western values are compatible with Islam.’ So said Sadiq Khan after his victory as London mayor. Trevor Phillips, former chief of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, takes […]

A excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the controversy over anti-Semitism in the British Labour party: Anti-Semitism used to be a problem primarily of the right. It wasn’t that the left had a totally clean bill of health — there is a history of left-wing anti-Semitism — but its firm foundation of universal values and egalitarian principles established a proud tradition of fighting bigotry against Jews. . In recent decades, however, much of the […]

This Wednesday, Channel 4 in Britain will broadcast a Trevor Phillips documentary on ‘What British Muslims really think’. On Sunday, the Sunday Times published details of an ICM poll about Muslim attitudes commissioned for the programme and ran an essay by Phillips on Muslim integration. The headlines generated by the poll – ‘Half of British Muslims want gay sex banned says poll’; ‘Most Muslims would not give terror tip-offs’, etc – and Phillip’s argument (‘the integration of Muslims will probably […]